Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

He wrote: “How flattering to the pride of man to think that the stars on their courses watch over him, and typify, by their movements and aspects, the joys or the sorrows that await him!”

The Eternal Library does not acknowledge a heaven. The Eternal Library’s official policy states: Man is life’s custodian. The Librarians are the custodians of man and his passions, and any knowledge he conceives of or possesses. Therefore, the librarians are the custodians of the stars and the skies; any other notion of heaven is a dream, a false idol to explain the fall of mankind.

William Osler once said that humanity has three enemies: “fever, famine, and war, but fever is by far the greatest.”

The Eternal Library firmly agrees. This is why they must lock up the fevers, with all the spells and science and strength of will that lives in the world. This is why the fever librarian must never fail. The consequences would be unthinkable — an unending disaster for the future of man.

Sometimes, the fever librarian wonders if she might be her own ghost. She cannot be sure of how long she has been here at the Eternal Library. She cannot be sure that she still has a soul. Her heart beats, her skin burns and bleeds, but a ghost, too, can be full of blood. A ghost can be a billion years old and dead inside forever.

Only this ghost feels sure she is rising from the dead at last. She is not sure of anything else in the world, of the facts or the fevers or the future, but she is sure that a thing is about to begin or end; which, she does not know.

It is late in the year, the season of bonfires, when the fevers finally swarm and overtake the librarian that tends them. She has been smoldering for months under their disturbing influence. Now she begins to burn.

Be assured that the fever librarian is actually the hero of her story. Be assured that she is much stronger than she looks, especially in the throes of such heart-driving heat. Here she is eating her notes. Here she is pulling out drawer after drawer of index cards. Here she is overturning the tables in this temple of learning. Here she is with gallons, with buckets, with fire hoses of water to put out these fevers and drown all our passions and finally, finally send them back to the sea from whence all our troubles are come.

Set swam into the world with the new century. He was so many years the youngest that he sat as audience for his siblings, rapt in the soft glow of their stage presence. And in return they made him their favorite. They protected him; they enfolded him in their obsessions; they gave him their secrets to keep.

His brother Cedric, an explorer by trade, took him to dusty, dark museums fallen out of favor. He showed Set impossibly large-hipped stone women and spear tips and tiny skulls no bigger than an apple. He told Set stories about the hunter that brought down the saber-tooth, about the pygmy races who lived hidden in the hearts of jungles, about the sleep spells shamans cast in the days before dreams were invented.

Constance — his only sister — served him sweets and ginger beer, and bought him penny dreadfuls and souvenir pen wipers — all the things his mother, Pru, forbade for their vulgarity. (Pru did not quite say that Constance was vulgar, though she labeled her “modern” in a way that implied no small degree of disappointment.) Constance liked to read Set love letters from her admirers. She would laugh, a low laugh like far-off thunder, and toss the letters on the fire. They always seemed to be from glamorous people. Set ambushed a distracted Pru at the piano one afternoon and asked if his sister was famous, and Pru frowned and said, yes, possibly more than she should have been. Set asked what she was famous for , and the Chopin became very loud indeed.

Set’s father was the family enigma. He died when Set was quite small, and before that he did not seem to live in the big house on Long Island with Pru and Cedric and Constance and Oliver. He was always just Father, a blur or blank half-remembered, filled with whiskers and ample pocket-watch chain, large teeth and small keen eyes. In later years, Set was always mixing up his memories of Father and of President Roosevelt on newsreel.

Set’s brother Oliver had an orderly mind, doors for each feeling and shelves for the strongest memories. So it was not surprising to Set that Oliver should own a self-dubbed Cabinet of Curiosities that he opened only for Set and for his lover, Desmond, whom everyone pretended was Oliver’s business partner even though he and Oliver used to sit in the back at the Fortuna Music Hall and do what Set-as-a-child thought was a good deal of embracing for two grown men with whiskers.

Pru allowed Oliver to keep his cabinet in the parlor: a long room clad in green and garnet, full of model ships and music boxes and stuffed owls, it was the perfect place for Oliver’s oddities. Oliver said his cabinet contained the best of this world and the remnants of the one before it. Set was confused and fascinated by it, this gilded wooden case, long as one wall and topped in sections by a carved snake, a wolf, and a fierce giantess; this exhibit where brass clocks butted against stringless lutes, and chalky human bones overlapped pearlescent fish scales and fetuses floating in jars. Indonesian ceremonial masks jostled for space with small paintings by Manet and Matisse and Toulouse-Lautrec; a little glass chimera peeked out from behind a magic lantern; leather pouches full of old faerie dust sat squat and useless, their magical essence long since dried up; three crystal balls were wrapped in maps made by Chinese explorers in the 1500s; a tapestry of a stag hunted by dogs hung crooked and slashed in one corner; a jar full of trolls’ feet was tipped over and spilling out; and everywhere were stuffed creatures, claws and feathers, obelisks, pieces of armor, bits of Claude Lorrain glass, and branches made of wood, of iron, of ash.

It’s just a jumble, Set said to Oliver, the first time he was allowed to view the collection. He preferred the museums Cedric took him to, the glass cabinets and typed cards serving as careful descriptors. Those objects felt old, felt important. They were discoveries. What was all this except a lot of disordered rubbish?

Oliver and Desmond smiled at one another. There is an order, said Oliver. You just need the key. He showed Set the thick black notebook — the Catalogue, he called it, and Set had the uncanny sense that this was Oliver’s brain, the flesh made word — filled with precise descriptions and locations for each item in the collection in Oliver’s small, careful handwriting. Curiosity #21, read Set. Preserved Chlamyphorus truncatus , commonly known as the pink fairy armadillo. Specimen originally from central Argentina, acquired 1890. He flipped to the middle of the notebook: Curiosity #760. Hinged brass collar, Iron Age. Embellished with decorative patterns in the Celtic style. Inlaid with glass or precious stones; ornaments missing or lost .

Inge was born as her mother died. She grew to resemble her mother so much that her father despised her; he saw her as a constant reminder of all he had lost. He had doted on her sisters and brother, had been a fair, if slightly stern father. But now he abandoned the care of his youngest to her exceedingly English governess: a stout woman with a wine-colored complexion and a faint brown mustache, a woman who went in for pinching and hair pulling and other invisible injuries. Inge’s older siblings were sent to boarding school, but Inge was not. (The family had also, it should be said, fallen into penury by then.) Your father, said the governess, has thrown you away, and she would squeeze the soft underside of Inge’s arm, or, when she was impassioned into imprudence, smack Inge across the mouth so hard that her lip split. On those occasions, Inge was instructed to spin tales of her own clumsiness, and these only served to make her father dislike her more. Her mother, the mirror, had been so graceful. The older she grew, the less her father could bear to look at her. And so, as the money dried up and the decaying manor fell apart around them — and the family and few remaining servants moved into a single wing — still Inge’s father managed to avoid her, dining late and rising early, spending days walking with his dogs and his rifle out in the village and through the abandoned tenant farms.